Culture came naturally in his family. He had written five thousand octosyllabic rhymes at the age of twelve. His first verses were published when he was young, and because one or two critics made fun of them, he took refuge in his dignity and waited nine years to publish again. “Ulysses” made his fame when he was thirty-three, and two years later he received a pension from the Tory government. Two years after that came “The Princess,” a dramatic composition in ridicule of the higher education of women; it suited the lower-educated Victorian ladies so perfectly that it ran into five editions. In 1850, at the age of forty-one, Tennyson became the laureate; when he was seventy-four he was raised to the peerage. No other English poet has earned this honor, which is reserved to wholesale slaughterers of animals and men, to brewers, whiskey distillers, diamond merchants, and publishers of capitalist dope. Concerning Lord Tennyson as an artist in words, there is little that needs to be said. He received his “ten talents” and put them to use; everywhere he went he carefully collected poetical impressions, words, phrases and ideas, and jotted them down. No one ever spent more time filing and perfecting, and no one was more completely master of beautiful utterance. He had an inquiring mind, and picked up ideas on all subjects and put them into his poetry; but unfortunately he found consecutive thinking very difficult, and you can find as many contradictory thoughts in him as in the Bible. He has an invincible repugnance to the drawing of uncomfortable conclusions; whenever his thinking leads to such, he evaporates in a cloud of comforting words. His verse contains more platitudes and cheap cheer-up stuff than any other poet known to me; and so he was the darling of the antimacassar age. England had put down Napoleon and taken possession of the trade of the world. There were revolutions on the continent, but at home nothing worse than a few rioters to be clubbed by the police. The foggy islands were a safe haven, administered by landlords and merchants. Everything was for the best in the best of all possible worlds, and the function of a poet was to tell it to the people, in such beautiful language that they would accept it as a revelation. Tennyson in his early days had shown traces of liberalism, but the Chartist movement frightened him into reaction, and there he stayed. “Shout for England!” says the chorus of one of his poems, and the function of the shout in suppressing thought is understood by all students of mob psychology. “Riflemen, form!” exhorted another poem, published in the “Times”-- Let your reforms for a moment go; Look to your butts, and take good aim.